HandBrake update works with more video files

HandBrake — the popular open-source video conversion utility — has been updated to 0.9.3. The new version is available for download.

HandBrake has primarily been used to help users “rip” commercial DVDs encrypted with some form of copy protection, so users can watch videos on their computer without having the DVD installed, or converted to a format viewable on a handheld video system.

0.9.3 adds “universal input,” enabling you to use “practically any type of video” as a source. Video quality for H.264-encoded videos has been improved; control over multiple audio tracks has been added; persistent queues are now cached to disk for safekeeping between sessions; new presets have been added; audio-video synchronisation has been added; a decomb filter is new; deinterlacing now runs as a multithreaded process on multicore and multiprocessor hardware; and more. The developers count over 600 changes to the codebase in this incremental release.

One important change affects how the software works with commercial encrypted DVDs, however: The software no longer does internal DVD decryption. HandBrake now requires you to have VLC — the cross-platform media player — installed if you wish to do DVD decryption.

“HandBrake will dynamically load VLC’s copy of libdvdcss if you have it in your Applications folder,” explained the developers. “… If you’re on a Mac, and you have VLC 0.9.x installed, you won’t even notice the internal capability’s gone.”